Here I am in Australia, enjoying the fresh air on the St Kilda seafront and a 4 mile trot to get over the first flight of the Formula 1 season.

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be starting the 2012 season as lead commentator for a brand new Formula 1 channel, I might have laughed. But brilliant things happen in life and here I am working for Sky Sports F1 HD – a channel dedicated to the sport I live and breathe.

To be honest, it wasn’t a hard choice to make. When Sky Sports say, “We want you”, there would have to be a very good reason to say no. And there was never going to be a reason good enough not to join a team that has not only decided to cover Formula 1, but will surely change the way the sport’s covered forever.

Sky’s F1 philosophy is focused on not just featuring the guys at the front, but also those throughout the grid, whose stories and experiences are just as enthralling. ‘A whole new ball game’ as it were, but I think that tag-line may have been used in the past…

I’ve said before that our very first get-together for the F1 team was akin to my first day at senior school. New faces, new surroundings and some old mates with me that had made the move too. Pretty soon we were laughing and joking as if we’d been working together forever. It’s a great team to be part of and that’s so important given that we’ve got 20 races ahead of us between now and November, and that we’re probably going to see as much of each other as we do our families. And that’s just for this year of course, there'll be many years ahead of us on Sky Sports F1.

My home away from home is the commentary box though, with my old flatmate Anthony Davidson joining me for the practice sessions before Martin Brundle comes in for the qualifying races and the Grand Prix itself. We had a rehearsal and, to our delight, we both felt we’d been sharing a mic for years.

I can’t wait to do it all for real now. The buzz you get from live broadcasting is unlike anything else. And it’s a new buzz of course as I move from radio to TV. A different style certainly, but only in that the descriptive commentary needed in radio isn’t as necessary as before. My rather excitable tone is here to stay, fear not.

So back to my run along the beach here in Melbourne, which has given me a chance to think through what may happen this season. Which of the six world champions will triumph again? Could we have a new star rising to the fore? Which team will find a competitive edge? Will it be legal? Can any of the new teams make real progress? Is Sebastian Vettel as great as they think and just what will he be calling his car this year now that ‘Kinky Kylie’ is consigned to the showroom?

It’s amazing what goes through your mind when jogging in the sunshine in the most perfect place to find yourself on a March morning. But then life and Formula 1 is amazing and it’s a privilege to be slap bang in the middle of the action.